Photographer of the Beatles
NEW YORK — Astrid Kirchherr, the German photographer who shot some of the earliest and most striking images of the Beatles and helped shape their trendsetting visual style, has died at age 81.
She died Tuesday in her native Hamburg, days before her 82nd birthday, her friend Kai-Uwe Franz told The Associated Press. Her death was first announced by Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn.
“God bless Astrid a beautiful human being,” Ringo Starr tweeted. George Harrison’s widow, Olivia Harrison, tweeted that Ms. Kirchherr was “so thoughtful and kind and talented, with an eye to capture the soul.”
Kirchherr was a photographer’s assistant in Hamburg in 1960 when her thenboyfriend Klaus Voormann dropped in at a seedy club, the Kaiserkeller, and noticed a young British rock group recently named themselves the Beatles. As she later recalled, Voormann then spent the next few days persuading Ms. Kirchherr to join him, a decision which profoundly changed her.
“It was like a merry-go-round in my head, they looked absolutely astonishing,” Ms. Kirchherr later told Beatles biographer Bob Spitz. “My whole life changed in a couple of minutes. All I wanted was to be with them and to know them.”
Ms. Kirchherr had dreamed of photographing “charismatic” men and found her ideal subjects in the Beatles, especially their bassist at the time, Stuart Sutcliffe.
Her love affair with Sutcliffe was tragically brief. Sutcliffe collapsed and died of a cerebral hemorrhage in April 1962, at age 21. Ms. Kirchherr later married twice, including to the British drummer Gibson Kemp. Both marriages ended in divorce, and she would long say that she never got over Sutcliffe’s death.